A blog about things that I find interesting, from my adventures around the world from 4 wheel driving around Australia's remote desert areas to motorcycling around in the Arctic or really anything that I feel like sharing!

Sunday, 31 July 2011

The “Gary Highway”, as it was so named on the map, might give someone some false illusion that the road is a well used and busy road with maybe 4 or 6 lanes for traffic, but to properly picture the scene you have to get that vision out of your head. What I saw before me was 2 wheel tracks that disappeared into a lake and came out the other side about 1 kilometre in the distance.

Before I left Alice Springs I had been told that there had been quite a bit of rain in this area in the past few months, and the scene before me was backing that up quite nicely. The land around the “highway” which is really just a “way” was covered in wild flowers of many colours, white, purple and yellow. I was really finding it hard to believe that this area was almost the exact centre of the Gibson Desert, so named after the first white man to have died there, Alfred Gibson. There was no way I was going to attempt to drive through the lake to the other side by myself, it was really too far to walk to test the bottom to see how deep or solid it was and I couldn’t afford to risk getting bogged in there as I had not seen a single human being for about 1 week.

Today had already been quite an interesting day due to some events that had taken place in the morning…

The Gary "Highway"

It had been an unusually warm night for the time of year and the fridge in my car was working overtime keeping itself cool. In the morning I hadn’t notice that the fridge had stopped working until I had finished packing up and went to start the engine. The old bus just responded to my turning of the ignition key with a few clicks. I instantly recognised the sound, it was the sound of the starter motor’s solenoid clicking. Normally this sound is drowned out by the sound of the starter motor, but today the starter motor did nothing, I know the cause of this too, the battery was too flat to start the engine! Some people claim that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die, this is probably something that is difficult to prove, for me in the few seconds after I tried to start the engine many many things went through my brain, and maybe the best way to describe it was my life flashing before my eyes. Something like this in life is normally not too big a problem… For most people it might mean being a bit late for work while you wait on someone coming to help, perhaps a neighbour with a set of jump cables that he or she can connect to their car to allow yours to start. For me the problem was a bit bigger.

Many things went through my head when I again tried to turn the ignition key, which is normally followed up by the noise of a 4.2 litre diesel engine bursting into life, yet again only some clicking noises. I thought then about how long ago it had been since I had seen anyone else. I remembered 2 cars about 7 days earlier on another more commonly used track, but I had seen nobody on the Gary Highway yet. I spent some time thinking about what I could do to pass the time while I waited for help and I started building myself up for what I thought could be up to a 2 week wait for any help. I sat in the driver’s seat while I thought about my future. My water supply would have allowed me to stay alive for over 1 month in this heat and my food would last around 2 months, yet I would just have been eating rice in the end. I tried to think of a few games I could play to pass the time, “eye spy” didn’t seem to work with just 1 person so I moved on to thinking of a way to count how many grains of sand there were in the Gibson Desert, but that I failed on as I didn’t know how deep the sand goes! After a few hours I got pretty bored of sitting waiting and not knowing how long until someone would drive passed, and it was about that time that I came up with a fantastic idea!

In the car I had 60 metres of climbing rope, a climbing harness, several pulleys and a set of rope ascenders. All this equipment was a mix of 4 wheel drive recovery gear and my rock climbing gear. I was parked in what turned out to be a really great spot as there was a nice looking ghost gum tree just a few metres behind the Landcruiser and an even more perfectly placed branch that was to help me execute my plan...

I started by throwing a light rope over the branch, I then used that to pull the climbing rope over the branch and back down, I tied the lose end around the trunk and then I climbed to the top of the tree with the ascenders, taking with me a pulley from the recovery gear, which I attached to the branch with a sling from my climbing gear. I pulled the other end of the climbing rope up the tree and fed it through the pulley. After abseiling down I set about finding the heaviest of all my belongings to which I could use as counter weights to help me tow the Landcruiser backwards at a fast enough pace to allow me to “bump start” it. To do this I would have to move the car fast enough forwards or backwards and then select a gear and quickly let go the clutch to allow the wheels to turn the engine and therefore start the engine.

I had 100 litres of fuel and 100 litres of water, all in 20 litre containers. I set about attaching what I thought I could pull up the tree in 1 go. 80 litres of water was the first to make it up to the top of the tree then I pulled another 20 litres of water and 60 litres of diesel. Total weight, about 150 kg all suspended from a frail looking Ghost Gum in the middle of the Gibson Desert with a rope running from the counter weights which were now about 5 or 6 metres above the ground and now attached by rope to the back of my Landcruiser where the rope went through another pulley and back onto the base of the tree. Going by my calculations this would give me 300 kg of pulling power to pull me in reverse towards the tree. I had no idea if this was going to work but I was about to find out.

Climbing and 4x4 recovery gear used to help start the 4x4

Putting on my climbing harness ready to climb the tree

Climbing the tree to rid the rope through the pulley

Climbing rope rigged to the tow bar with a pulley

Pulling 80 litres of water up the tree (still 20 litres to go, and 60 litres of diesel)

80 litres of water up the tree

I jumped back into the driver’s seat and switched on the ignition. In the past when “bump starting” motorbikes or cars I always wonder which gear should be selected. Too low a gear and the wheels might just skid and too high a gear and the engine might not turn fast enough to start, but since I was pulling the car backwards I really only had 1 choice of gear and that was reverse, but then I remembered about low range and carefully thought about if I should use it or not… In the end I stuck with high range and let off the handbrake and allowed the car to start rolling backwards, driven totally by the gravity of the water and fuel… Now the timing here had to be perfect, if I let the clutch out too soon the car would not be going fast enough to start the engine and it would probably have the same effect as pressing the brakes, or too late and the fuel and water would hit the ground and the car would roll to a stop at the base of the tree. I carefully watched my 20 litre container and waited until they were about to hit the ground and just at that very moment I lifted my foot off of the clutch pedal and just as I heard that big diesel engine burst into life! I quickly pressed my foot on the clutch again before I crashed into the tree.

One thing I was always told about travelling in the Desert was to make sure you always carry enough water, at the end of the day that’s what keeps you alive, I just always had it in mind that it would have been used for drinking, I didn’t ever think that water would help me start my car, but this amazing stuff did just that!

Water and Diesel pulling 4x4 backwards... The moment of truth!

Well those were the events that had taken place in the morning, back to the present. I was now standing in front of a lake that the road disappeared into. This was certainly the most water I had seen in months. I turned around from that seemingly endless mass of water which the 2 wheel tracks that I was following disappeared into. In my past experience of these things there was always some other way to get around, I just needed to search for it. After a while I found a track which headed to the East. I decided that this must be the bypass track. I followed this rough little track for a few kilometres. The track was rough as it had never been "made", it looked like only a few vehicles had made it into what it was by driving over it. Just then I saw a man running towards me on an intercept course for where I would likely be in the time it took him to run as fast as he could in my direction. The man had light facial hair and was wearing a shirt which seemed a bit like something Robinson Crusoe may have worn while he was stranded on his desert island. By this time I had pretty much decided that something was wrong, at least I hoped it was that, my other thoughts were that of getting brutally murdered in the middle of the Gibson Desert, but decided that only happens in the movies.

Gary Highway meets Lake Cohen in flood

Alex and his brother David had encountered the very same obstacle on the road as I had, but they had become bogged in their 4wd trying to get around the lake, after learning about this the next question which had not quite reached the tip of my tong was how long they had been stuck here for. I made a few guesses to myself and tried to judge it on Alex’s facial hair length and the colour of his white and mud stained shirt, the extreme lack of anyone else around and his cat like reaction of running towards the sound of my Landcruiser as it bashed its way through the bush of the bypass track, I put my guess at 2 weeks that they had been stuck for just before I asked the question, which to the reply was, “about 2 hours”.

They were heading North the same as me and must have passed by me while I was off looking at something on a side road earlier in the afternoon.

Alex jumped into the passenger’s seat and we drove back to close to his car. I didn’t want to drive too close as the ground was pretty soft and it was no use having 2 cars bogged up to the axels in mud. We both thought one was more than enough! We linked all of the towing straps we had together and attached one end to the back of Alex’s car and the other end to the front of my car. Both of us tuned into channel 40 on our radios and when I said go Alex was to drive backwards, in the meantime I would do the same and hopefully the end result would be Alex’s car being freed from the bog. The plan worked perfectly and we both drove backwards together to get to harder ground and didn’t stop until we were both back firmly on the track.

By this time the sun had almost set and I said we should just setup camp somewhere close by and tackle the lake in the morning, both Alex and David agreed and we drove a short distance to our camp for the night. One thing I love about travelling in these remote regions is the not knowing what was going to happen next. I found it quite unusual that water had started my car that very morning, but later in the day the very same substance had stopped Alex’s car only to be allowed to move again by the very car that had been started by water that morning. Life most certainly is weird.